In Analiese’s post “Lift Yourself” she talks about how she used to underestimate her own skills as a writer, but after taking this course she has become more confident in her abilities. As I was reading her post, I realized I had a similar experience. In the past, I felt blind to the quality of my own writing. I think this can largely be attributed to the fact that I am hard on myself when it comes to my writing. Dr. McCoy always tells us how she has high expectations of us, but I think that the expectations that I have for myself will always be higher.
I always put a lot of effort and time into whatever it is that I’m writing (unless I’ve procrastinated an assignment and ran out of time to work on it any longer). But even though I was producing the best work that I could at that time, I always felt like it could be better. This made it difficult for me to judge the quality of what I produced. My thought process went something like this: “If my writing could be better, then how can it be good now?” This way of thinking is obviously very flawed, because as I have now realized, all writing always has the possibility to improve—but this does not mean that it is bad in its current state. It’s easy to judge writing purely based on technicalities, but there’s so many factors that go into determining what makes writing good. I think that oftentimes some of the factors, such as the emotions that writing can invoke, introduce a bias that can make it difficult to accurately judge something. One person might love a certain poem because it reminded them of a happy time in their life, while another person might hate the poem because they could not establish any connection with it. I personally do not think that it is necessary to personally relate to writing in order to enjoy it, but this is the mindset that some people have. Another example of bias is if the person reading your work is someone that you’re close to; this person is more likely to exaggerate how good your writing actually is. It’s like when your mother compliments you; you don’t doubt that she’s telling the truth, but this is a person that loves you and wants to see you happy.
So, what type of person has the ability to accurately judge your work? The short answer to this question is a trained professor—but I won’t be in school forever. As the section titled “Reflection for Career Planning” of Reflective Writing shows, it’s going to be important to have the ability to accurately judge your own abilities when trying to acquire a job later on. As of right now, I still don’t feel qualified enough to judge my own work, but this class has definitely set me down that path. I will have to grade myself on our final paper for this class, and I think it will be beneficial in furthering my progress of becoming confident in my own abilities.